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It could be if our workload was relatively stable and there were spare engineering cycles to undertake a migration and all that this entailed. Neither of these
by rbranson 10y ago
It could be if our workload was relatively stable and there were spare engineering cycles to undertake a migration and all that this entailed. Neither of these is the case.
Much of what allowed us to implement these savings quickly with a small team was the flexibility afforded by cloud infrastructure. Poor decisions are easy to reverse, but in a bare metal world you better be damn sure what you're doing, which slows down the decision-making process and seriously complicates experimentation. The number of people who know how to build out datacenters at the scale of thousands of machines is vanishingly small.
We'd also need to replace IaaS services like ECS, ELB, ElastiCache, RDS, and DynamoDB. There are certainly off-the-shelf replacements, but we'd need to build-out the expertise within our teams to operate these systems. We're talking roughly a dozen or so engineers working full time for many, many months to get these systems in place from scratch, on top of the even larger effort to design and build out datacenters. I'd much rather plow those cycles into efforts like expanding to multiple regions and improving reliability of internal services. That's a much better return on investment for our customers.
Right now we're in the sweet spot for the cloud. We're way too big to run on trivial amounts of hardware, growing at a rate that makes it difficult to stay ahead of demand in a datacenter-centric world, and too small to justify investing in a scalable hardware build-out.
- user5994461 10y agoTry all the same on Google Cloud, you'll save half the money compared to AWS, probably more. Disclaimer: I am NOT affiliated to Google in any way.
- QuinnyPig 10y ago> It could be if our workload was relatively stable +1. If your entire environment is steady-state, it may be worth considering a migration to bare metal. That said, you can expect: * Worse uptime * A fair bit of retraining / hiring different skillsets * A loss of engineering focus as they work on the migration instead of feature expansion It can make sense economically, but that discussion goes well past "the monthly AWS bill."
- lafay 10y agoThis article makes a good case for having at least one early team member who knows how to build out physical infrastructure at scale, even if you initially decide on AWS / GCE / Azure: http://firstround.com/review/the-three-infrastructure-mistakes-your-company-must-not-make/ http://firstround.com/review/the-three-infrastructure-mistak...
- rbranson 10y agoThis might sound a bit extreme, but contrary to most FRR pieces this is garbage advice. Startups should focus first on getting their product-market fit before trying to future-proof themselves from a future that doesn't yet exist.
- user5994461 10y agoRegister your startup to Amazon or Google, you'll get 100k of free credits. Keep a look on your bill because you don't want to run anything. But take advantage of having no hassle for your first years.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoI would bet you 1000 USD that it would be eye-opening to buy a 64gb RAM, 8 core CPU server, put 4 SSDs in it in RAID10 config, and test your entire stack on just that box using Docker, KVM, whatever. Just running it beside your desk and having your other devs beat on it. You might have to stub out some things using e.g. Cassandra or another open source alternative; just use a Docker or VM image without the production redundancy. You did admit, that you have no idea how much performance is being dropped on the floor due to not using dedicated hardware. So why not test it? My belief: you would find you are paying AWS far more than they are actually worth.
- rbranson 10y agoI've operated on-prem and colo physical data centers. I've also been part of larger companies where someone else deploys baremetal on my behalf. I've been running infrastructure on top of AWS off-and-on since 2008. I've done a live migration of one of the largest Internet sites from AWS to baremetal in data centers. I feel pretty good about keeping our infrastructure in AWS for the foreseeable future.
- patrickg_zill 10y agoI apologize; I didn't read that part of your bio on the site. Your post seemed to indicate that you hadn't done any calculations for the bare metal server with your own vms scenario. But clearly you have, if only mentally.
- rbranson 10y agoNo worries! I'm not super into self-promotion, but I do think my background is relevant in this case. Either way, the decisions that go into a strategy like this involve a mountain of variables.